“Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow” on the implications of deaccess policies for donations to museums

Severe budget cuts in the cultural sectors of many countries have spurred disparate suggestions for alternative sources available to public institutions. Deaccessioning may be an option, although controversial, to guarantee the survival of cultural institutions. This paper addresses the consequences that deaccessioning may have on donations of artworks to museums, by developing a sequential game with incomplete information. We investigate the interactions between donors and museums, when the former is uncertain about the commitment of a museum not to deaccess part of its endowment in the future. Our analysis shows that deaccessioning may reduce art donations to museums. Interestingly, public grants to museums cause a negative externality to a committed museum, which experiences a reduction in donations. Results provide intuitions for the widespread resistance to deaccessioning of museum associations, for their efforts to enforce common regulation restricting the use of proceeds to the acquisition of art, and also for the proliferation of private art museums.     

Working With Students With Psychiatric Disabilities or Other Emotional Problems

The professional literature on gatekeeping in social work education has grown; however, there remains a dearth in the literature regarding how educators truly work to engage students who are experiencing a psychiatric disability or other emotional problem. This qualitative study explored the experiences of 26 social work educators from 22 colleges and universities in the United States. Practice wisdoms emerged as interwoven strategies which encourage proactive interventions that accentuate students’ strengths through socially just opportunities. Identified strategies include having an awareness of psychosocial and environmental stressors that students may be experiencing, recognizing warning signs, approaching students, and building appropriate faculty–student relationships.     

The efficiency change of Italian public universities in the new millennium: a non-parametric analysis

The paper assesses the evolution of efficiency of Italian public universities for the period 2000–2010. It aims at investigating whether their levels of efficiency showed signs of convergence, and if the well-known disparity between northern and southern regions decreased. For this purpose, we use a refinement of data envelopment analysis, namely window analysis, which allows for measuring efficiency in cross-sectional and time-varying data. We find that the efficiency of most universities registered only marginal changes in the period, although a notable re-ranking occurred. However, changes in the management of universities, consequential to the reform processes, did not affect the long-run tendencies, such as the persisting difference in performance between north and south.     

Managing the Process of International Collaboration in Online Course Development: A Case-Example Involving Higher Education Institutions in Ireland,Switzerland, Austria,and the United Kingdom

There has been significant growth recently in online learning and joint programmes of education involving collaborative partnerships between and among higher education institutions in different jurisdictions. Utilising an interdisciplinary team model (Care and Scanlan 2001), we describe in this article the process of collaboration among four European institutions in Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom in order to develop and deliver an accredited online course on the management of work-related stress for health and social care workers. This course was also one of the first to pilot a system of equivalency between two European vocational and higher education credit schemes to promote learner mobility and recognition of a new international qualification. Although this process of collaboration occurred within a pan-European context, important lessons may be drawn from this explanation that are of potential interest to the wider international audience.     

Young Children's Self‐Concepts Include Representations of Abstract Traits and the Global Self

There is debate about the abstractness of young children's self‐concepts—specifically, whether they include representations of (a) general traits and abilities and (b) the global self. Four studies (N = 176 children aged 4–7) suggested these representations are indeed part of early self‐concepts. Studies 1 and 2 reexamined prior evidence that young children cannot represent traits and abilities. The results suggested that children's seemingly immature judgments in previous studies were due to peculiarities of the task context not the inadequacy of children's self‐concepts. Similarly, Studies 3 and 4 revealed that, contrary to claims of immaturity in reasoning about the global self, young children update their global self‐evaluations in flexible, context‐sensitive ways. This evidence suggests continuity in the structure of self‐concepts across childhood.     

Peabody bimonthly booklist

THE CONCEPT OF A UNIVERSITY by Kenneth Minogue. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1973. 231 pp. $8.00.

THE TRIAL OF MARTIN LUTHER KING by Alan F. Westin and Barry Mahoney. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975. 342 pp. $7.95.

TEACHING THE MENTALLY RETARDED CHILD, Second Edition by Natalie Perry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. xi + 751 pp. $15.00.

MY SISTER LOOKS LIKE A PEAR by Douglas Anderson. New York: Hart Publishing Company, Inc., 1974. 268 pp. $7.50.     

The use of grey literature in health sciences: a preliminary survey

The paper describes some initiatives in the field of grey literature (GL) and the activities, from 1985, of the Italian Library Association Study Group. The major categories of GL are defined; a survey that evaluates the use of GL by end users in the health sciences is described. References in selected periodicals and databases have been analyzed for the years 1987-1988 to determine the number of articles citing GL, the number of GL citations found in selected periodicals, the various types of GL found, and the number of technical reports cited and their country of origin and intergovernmental issuing organization. Selected databases were also searched to determine the presence of GL during those same years. The paper presents the first results obtained.